3.3. Converting to an ext3 File System

Always use the e2fsck utility to check your filesystem before and after using tune2fs. A default installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses ext3 for all file systems.

To convert an ext2 filesystem to ext3, log in as root and type the following command in a terminal:

tune2fs -j <block_device>

where <block_device> contains the ext2 filesystem you wish to convert.

A valid block device could be one of two types of entries:

A mapped device — A logical volume in a volume group, for example, /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02.

A static device — A traditional storage volume, for example, /dev/hdbX, where hdb is a storage device name and X is the partition number.

Issue the df command to display mounted file systems.

For the remainder of this section, the sample commands use the following value for the block device:

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02

You must recreate the initrd image so that it will contain the ext3 kernel module. To create this, run the mkinitrd program. For information on using the mkinitrd command, type man mkinitrd. Also, make sure your GRUB configuration loads the initrd.

If you fail to make this change, the system still boots, but the file system is mounted as ext2 instead of ext3.

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